THE GLOBAL WINDOW OF TURKISH FOOD AND AGRICULTURE The Global Window of Turkish Food and Agriculture Sector
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10/07/2025
Inefficient farm structures, marked by high levels of land fragmentation and small average farm sizes, often result in low productivity and competitiveness and hinder agricultural and rural development. By addressing these inefficient farm structures, land consolidation instruments have great potential to contribute to the necessary transformation towards greener and more sustainable agrifood systems.
The traditional objective of land consolidation programmes and projects has been to facilitate agricultural development by reducing land fragmentation and facilitating farm enlargement on a voluntary basis. Since the 1980s, land consolidation has in many Western European countries increasingly taken a multi-purpose approach, pursuing both agricultural development and public purposes related to nature restoration, environmental protection and, most recently, climate change adaptation and mitigation.
Land consolidation projects and programmes began in many countries in Western and Central Europe in the years after the First World War ended in 1918. Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire have an even longer tradition. Land consolidation programmes throughout Western and Central Europe really gained speed after 1945 supporting the mechanization of agriculture.
In Eastern Europe, beginning around 1990 with the transition towards market economy, land reform has involved the restitution to landowners of property taken during collectivization or the privatization of state land and its equal distribution to the rural population. In many countries, this has resulted in inefficient farm structures. In Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia and North Macedonia, for example, average farm sizes are between 1 and 3 ha, and more than 95 percent of all farms are smaller than 5 ha. Land fragmentation is excessive, with one farm typically divided into three to seven parcels, and the average size of arable agricultural land parcels often around 0.3 ha. In several countries, including Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and North Macedonia, one-third or more of the arable agricultural land has been abandoned due to inefficient farm structures and lack of access to irrigation leading to outmigration of particularly youth from rural areas.
Aerial photo of land consolidation area of Egri (Bitola Municipality), North Macedonia – after land consolidation…
Since the early 2000s, governments throughout Eastern Europe have recognized the need to address these structural problems and keep inefficient farm structures from hampering agricultural and rural development. This has led to the introduction of land consolidation instruments and, recently, to a growing interest in land banking. FAO has so far supported the process in 13 countries of Central and Eastern Europe, publishing guidance materials and good practices and establishing and facilitating the LANDNET technical network. FAO also has organized 27 regional workshops on land consolidation, land banking and related topics from 2002 to 2025.
Four countries in Eastern Europe – Cyprus, North Macedonia, Serbia and Türkiye – meet the minimum requirements for having a national land consolidation programme, and land consolidation has been introduced (but without yet having operational programmes) in Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo,[1] Montenegro, Republic of Moldova and Ukraine.
Successfully implemented land consolidation projects allow for private landowners and farmers to be compensated with other land in exchange for the land they give up for the mentioned public projects. However, while many landowners and farmers are interested in consolidating their fragmented land parcels, few are often interested in selling their land, even if they are not using it or have left it abandoned. Thus, if there is limited state-owned agricultural land available for the land consolidation planning process, land mobility is often low in project areas, limiting the options of development of small farms into commercial family farms. Low land mobility is especially critical when land consolidation is used to implement public-purpose projects aiming to take private land out of production, as is often the case in multi-purpose land consolidation projects.
Land banking can increase the land mobility through the purchase – at market conditions – of private land (e.g. from farmers who want to retire or who are not using their land) one to three years before the land consolidation project is started. If existing state-owned agricultural land is available in the project area, it is important that it be made available through privatization and exchange in the land consolidation planning process.
Land consolidation can catalyse the transformation towards greener and more sustainable local agrifood systems if the approach is sustainable in all three dimensions. Land consolidation should not contribute to land grabbing or land concentration but rather give priority to the provision of access to land for small farms, women farmers and young farmers. Land consolidation also should not contribute to agricultural development at the expense of nature, biodiversity or the environment.
[1] References to Kosovo shall be understood to be in the context of Security Council resolution 1244 (1999).
Source: www.fao.org
